Suggestion on random data generation

[awai54st]

Hi,

At the end of section "Exploring the application", when generating 1024 bytes of random data, the command below is used.

cat /dev/random | head -c 1024 > w/random1024.bin

While I was trying this with Ubuntu 16.04 terminal, the command could not stop normally. I found this link http://askubuntu.com/questions/192203/how-to-use-dev-urandom which suggests the following command instead.

head -c 1024 /dev/urandom > w/random1024.bin

This works for my machine. I tried the following command which also works for me.

cat /dev/urandom | head -c 1024 > w/random1024.bin

So maybe /dev/urandom works more reliably than /dev/random on UNIX-like machines?

[m8pple]

Ah, good point - yes, you're completely right, /dev/random and /dev/urandom
can behave differently, and /dev/urandom makes sense here as we don't
need guaranteed entropy (we don't even really need cryptographic quality).

I'll update the command as suggested.

Thanks!